Book picks similar to
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 by John J. Richetti
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17th-century
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All Things Wise and Wonderful
James Herriot - 1976
Now here's a third delightful volume of memoirs rich with Herriot's own brand of humor, insight, and wisdom.In the midst of World War II, James is training for the Royal Air Force, while going home to Yorkshire whenever possible to see his very pregnant wife, Helen. Musing on past adventures through the dales, visiting with old friends, and introducing scores of new and amusing character--animal and human alike--Herriot enthralls with his uncanny ability to spin a most engaging and heartfelt yarn.Millions of readers have delighted in the wonderful storytelling and everyday miracles of James Herriot in the over thirty years since his delightful animal stories were first introduced to the world.
Handsome Brute: The Story of a Ladykiller
Sean O'Connor - 2013
Since the 1940s, Heath has generally been dismissed as a sadistic sex-killer - the preserve of sensational Murder Anthologies - and little else. But the story behind the tabloid headlines reveals itself to be complex and ambiguous, provoking unsettling questions that echo across the decades to the present day.For the first time, with access to previously restricted files from the Home Office and Metropolitan Police, this book explores the complex motivations behind the murders through the prism of the immediate post-war period. Against the backdrop of a society in flux, a culture at a moment of change, how much is Heath's case symptomatic, or indeed, emblematic of the age he lived in?Handsome Brute is both an examination of the age of austerity, and a real-lifethriller as shocking and provocative as American Psycho or The Killer Inside Me, exploring the perspectives of the women in Heath's life - his wife, his mother, his lovers - and his victims. This collage of experiences from the women who knew him intimately probes the schism at the heart of his fascinating, chilling personality.
The Slimy Stuarts
Terry Deary - 1996
It tells why some Stuarts ate toads, snails and fleas, which king picked his nose and never washed his hands, and who wore fish on their feet. Facts about the revolting Roundheads and ghastly Guy Fawkes are given.
On the Genealogy of Morals
Friedrich Nietzsche - 1887
Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. This edition places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.
Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Brian Dolan - 2001
As far as Mary Berry was concerned, writing from her home in Mayfair on 2 August 1798, Napoleon was still running riot in Europe; the prospect of a French invasion of Britain was on everyone's lips, and the Continent was closed off to travellers. Twelve months earlier, Mary thought she would by now be on the Continent -- her much looked forward to third trip there -- conversing personally with Bertie Greatheed. But, alas, she was stranded, left to lament through correspondence her inability to escape. 'Most thoroughly, ' she wrote, 'do I begin to feel the want of that "shake out of English ways, English whims, and English prejudices, which nothing but leaving England gives one.'This was hardly an appropriate time to condemn 'English ways' and a desire for the continental lifestyle. Mary Berry could have been accused of being a French sympathiser -- a Jacobin (a radical activist in support of the principles of the French Revolution), or, with equivalent indignity, a Catholic. Mary was politically aware, but her restlessness with forced domestic residence overrode her sense of discretion. And anyway, she could have claimed with some justification, when "was there a good time for a woman to talk about shaking loose 'English prejudices' and broadening her intellectual horizons? By 'English prejudices' she was in part referring to a deep-rooted antagonism towardswomen's enlightenment. Mary felt confined, both physically and intellectually. The world seemed to be shrinking around her and without a change of air, and marooned in England she feared intellectual suffocation: After a residence of four or five years we all begin to forget the existence of the Continent of Europe, till we touch it again with our feet. The whole world to me, that is to say the whole circle of my ideas, begins to be confined between N. Audley-Street and Twickenham. I know no great men but Pitt and Fox, no king and queen but George and Charlotte, no towns but London. All the other cities, and courts, and great men of the world "may be very good sort of places and of people, for aught we know or care; except they are coming to invade us, we think no more of them than of the inhabitants of another planet.Just a few years earlier, before relations with France disintegrated completely, another English woman abandoned London and headed for Paris. Mary Wollstonecraft had longed to visit the Continent for some time. She had dreamt about it for over a decade, while pursuing a catalogue of occupations open to middle-class women, before taking pen in hand and daringly writing herself into a new career as an author. By 1792, with her authorial voice and confidence gathering strength, she published the work for which she is most well known: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written while intoxicated on the champagne fizz of the French Revolution. In this work she expressed a desire to see the revolutionary principles of "liberte, e galite and "fraternite apply to women as well as to men. Things were happening abroad; the Continent was a model of change andliberation. 'In France or Italy, have women confined themselves to domestic life?, ' she asked her readers. 'No!' England was behind the times. 'I long for "independence!, ' she cried. 'I will certainly visit France, it has long been a desire floating in my brain.' Within months of the publication and immediate success of her book, she had embarked on her journey.Mary Berry and Mary Wollstonecraft had much in common. Both were from middle-class backgrounds, but had seen the prospects of family wealth squandered by rogue relatives. At the time of their travels, neither was married. Both had overcome prejudices against female advancement and become published authors. And both would find the experience of foreign travel stimulating and cathartic. It is no accident that the metaphor of travel has long been used to represent the twists and turns, discoveries and drudgery of intellectual and psychological development.Travel and the knowledge collected along the way gave currency to the metaphor of 'the path to enlightenment'. By the end of the eighteenth century, the term was taken much more literally, and directed many women in their quests for improvement to the Continent. Letters and journals recorded their responses to life abroad, and in turn their discoveries about themselves. Travel writing, which included letters written home, presented a rare opportunity for Georgian women to articulate views on the world around them and their responses to it. Partly personal, biographical and intimate, their writings were often also political, descriptive, forthright and polemical. Through travel women of a certain status could fashion themselves into informed, discriminating observers, acute socialcommentators and listened-to cultural critics.Berry and Wollstonecraft were but two of a wide range of women determined to elevate themselves through travel. By the end of the eighteenth century, 'ladies of letters' had begun to settle into their pursuit of a 'life of the mind': continental travel allowed them to carve out niches in the intellectual geography of Enlightenment England. Many women who had the chance to travel were changing the course of common assumptions and showing others how travel could help them arrive at a new position -- personally and socially -- in polite society.A number of 'bluestocking' women, noted for their intellectual accomplishments, also left the droning world of polite drawing-room conversation to exercise their minds, enjoy social independence and cultivate new tastes, and romances, abroad. Travel helped women to develop views on the opportunities and rights to education; it guided those seeking separation from unhappy domestic circumstances; it worked to improve mental and physical health...
The English and their History
Robert Tombs - 2014
They first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.The English have come a long way from those precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it, and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity. Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly beginning a new period in their long history. Especially at times of change, history can help us to think about the sort of people we are and wish to be. This book, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division, and yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.
White Death
Jack Castle - 2016
Anthropologist Kate Foster accepts a job at an isolated research facility on a remote island surrounded by a vast ocean of crushing Pack Ice. Her scientific expedition becomes a mission of survival when she is joined by Detective Jack Decker with the Alaska Bureau of Investigations. Kate and Decker’s team of criminologists race against time to solve the gruesome and multiple homicides of her colleagues while someone, or something (thought to be extinct), is hunting them.
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant - 1781
It presents a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, its knowledge and its illusions. Reason, Kant argues, is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not therefore entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts. The Critique brings together the two opposing schools of philosophy: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Kant's transcendental idealism indicates a third way that goes far beyond these alternatives.
Shakespeare's Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects
Neil MacGregor - 2012
Think of Hamlet, trapped in indecision, or Macbeth’s merciless and ultimately self-destructive ambition, or the Machiavellian rise and short reign of Richard III. They are so vital, so alive and real that we can see aspects of ourselves in them. But their world was at once familiar and nothing like our own. In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, working together in a landmark collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, bring us twenty objects that capture the essence of Shakespeare’s universe. A perfect complement to A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor’s landmark New York Times bestseller, Shakespeare’s Restless World highlights a turning point in human history. This magnificent book, illustrated throughout with more than one hundred vibrant color photographs, invites you to travel back in history and to touch, smell, and feel what life was like at that pivotal moment, when humankind leaped into the modern age. This was an exhilarating time when discoveries in science and technology altered the parameters of the known world. Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation map allows us to imagine the age of exploration from the point of view of one of its most ambitious navigators. A bishop’s cup captures the most sacred and divisive act in Christendom. With A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor pioneered a new way of telling history through artifacts. Now he trains his eye closer to home, on a subject that has mesmerized him since childhood, and lets us see Shakespeare and his world in a whole new light.
Girl on the Golden Coin: A Novel of Frances Stuart
Marci Jefferson - 2014
But in 1660, the Restoration of Stuart Monarchy in England returns her family to favor. Frances discards threadbare gowns and springs to gilded Fontainebleau Palace, where she soon catches King Louis XIV’s eye. But Frances is no ordinary court beauty, she has Stuart secrets to keep and people to protect. The king turns vengeful when she rejects his offer to become his Official Mistress. He banishes her to England with orders to seduce King Charles II and stop a war.Armed in pearls and silk, Frances maneuvers through the political turbulence of Whitehall Palace, but still can’t afford to stir a scandal. Her tactic to inspire King Charles to greatness captivates him. He believes her love can make him an honest man and even chooses Frances to pose as Britannia for England’s coins. Frances survives the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and the debauchery of the Restoration Court, yet loses her heart to the very king she must control. Until she is forced to choose between love or war.On the eve of England’s Glorious Revolution, James II forces Frances to decide whether to remain loyal to her Stuart heritage or, like England, make her stand for Liberty. Her portrait as Britannia is minted on every copper coin. There she remains for generations, an enduring symbol of Britain’s independent spirit and her own struggle for freedom.
God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson - 2003
This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
My Secret Sister
Helen Edwards - 2013
But they could not protect her from her neglectful mother and violent father. Jenny was adopted and grew up in Newcastle. Neither woman knew of the other's existence until, in her 50s, Jenny went looking for her birth family and found she had a sister.
Culloden
John Prebble - 1961
There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.
Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony
Lee Miller - 2000
The colony on Roanoke Island off of the coast of North Carolina-115 men, women, and children-had disappeared without a trace. For four hundred years, the question of what became of the doomed settlers has remained unanswered. Where did they go? What really happened? Why were they on Roanoke Island in the first place, as that was not their destination? Using her consummate skills as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian, Lee Miller casts new light on the previously inexplicable puzzle of Roanoke, unraveling a thrilling web of deceit that can be traced back to the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth's government to finally solve the lasting mystery of the Lost Colony.